Who owns the equipment is just a matter of who replaces it if it breaks and maybe if you pay rental fees. From the operational point of view, it is all under the control of the cable company. When you hook up a modem you have to register it with your cable provider or it won't work. Due to the nature of DOCSIS, it isn't a "plug and go" situation they have to have it provisioned on their system. It has to be an approved model too, because they need to be able to send it a boot file which tells it various configuration options it needs. Also their equipment will ask the modem about its firmware, and update it if needed. Often when you first hook up a new modem your purchased it'll come up, get new firmware, and then reboot right away.
There's no difference to their equipment where a modem came from. All it cares about it what model it is. It then looks to see what bootfile and what firmware said modem ought to get.
The way it works is by getting your browser to go to the reboot page. However, if your browser can't, then it won't work. Since blocking the IP on your router will do that, you'll be safe. There is no public access to this interface, you have to get a computer on the local network to access it.
First off this thing is a modem, not a router. It just handles converting DOCSIS to ethernet, no built in routing capabilities or anything. They do make devices that are all-in-ones, but this one isn't.
Second, that "135 million" number is a marketing number. It is how many SurfBoard modems, and combo units total Arris claims they've sold, including when it was a Motorola brand. My SB6190, which has been on sale for all of like 5 months, has that same number stamped on it.
Third, many people are automatically protected by their routers since many routers ship with "disable private networks on WAN interface" turned on by default. That is, of course, a practical solution to the problem on any network. You can filter private networks (or just 192.168.100.1) on your WAN port, to which your modem is attached and then there's no issue.
Finally, while you could be mildly annoying with it, causing the modem to reboot, that's all you could do. It also wouldn't stick in a loop or anything like that as it requires you to click the link to make this happen.
So not a brilliant situation, but not really a big problem either. Also despite the scare words of "IPSs would have to roll out the fix" that is precisely what can, and likely will, happen. Your cable modem is under the control of your ISP and they can push new firmware to it when they need to. So fixes don't have to go out to lots of individuals, they just have to get them to the ISPs and then it can be automatically sent to all users. Updating modem firmware is something they do anyhow.
If you read the article that is precisely what happened. The Chinese bank froze the funds, and then reversed the transaction.
There are cases where someone can get screwed out of this happening, but when action is taken quickly it usually can be reversed since everything is tracked.
By that I mean that the GPU will be able to create a 4k framebuffer and render at 4k if it likes, and the outputs will be filly 4k capable.
However you are correct that it'll be seriously lacking in power. so as a practical matter, 99%+ of games will be rendered at a lower resolution and then upscaled. This is actually already the case to some extent. Many games cannot run at 1080 and hit their framerate target on the hardware today, so they are rendered at a lower resolution internally. For example Battlefield 4 has a 60 fps target since it is a shooter. To hit that it renders at 1600x900 on the PS4, and 1280x720 on the XBone. Watch Dogs is even more intense and so renders at those same resolutions, but only has a 30fps target.
So in some cases developers may elect to use more simple geometry/textures and thus will be able to make the new unit render at 4k natively, but most likely they'll elect not to. The trend seems to be to prefer higher detail games and sacrifice resolution and/or fps as necessary to hit that.
Seriously, there seems to be an obsession in parts of the Linux community to make yet another thing that already does what a bunch of existing software does. I'm not sure why but you see a lot of it. You'll get a distro that'll have 8 different media players, none of them worth a damn, rather than just having one good one but hey, you have options!
I'll give them the 100% retail markup, even though that's more than normal digital markup, but no more. I'm not going to have a situation like university bookstores where I sell the game and get 10% and the charge the person buying it 90% or some shit. You decide what you want to charge people for the used market, and give me half. I'll accept that. You get more greedy than that and I'm not interested.
The first is that writing a graphics driver is REALLY HARD. I think a lot of the people who were complaining and asking didn't really understand the magnitude of what they were talking about. They were people who'd maybe messed around with a network driver or something and said "Huh, drivers aren't that bad." Graphics drivers are ENORMOUS things, exceedingly complex. Lots and lots and lots of code that interacts with a lot of stuff in different ways. I mean the GPU is literally a little computer in many respects. Also GPUs change fast. New generations come out every 2 years or so and are often radically different architectures with tons of new features. So you have continual new work to do. It isn't like a NIC or RAID controller where 95%+ of the features might be copy-paste from the previous gen. I don't think a lot of people understood just how big an undertaking a GPU driver is.
The second is that I think people forget there's a REASON the drivers are closed source and that is they make use of licensed code that cannot be open sourced. Well guess what? That code gets licensed for a reason. It makes developing this stuff easier, more feasible. You don't have that as an OSS developer, of course, so your life is going to be more difficult. I think there is a perception that the closed source drivers are closed "just because" or that the licensed code in them could be ripped out and replaced easily. No, not so much it seems. There's a reason for it.
The GP didn't say they weren't developers, just that they didn't do a good job representing developers as a whole. The claims is that more developers develop on something, the GP points out that it is really more of a particular subset. His opinion is also that the subset in question isn't likely very good.
It's not a "No true Scotsman," fallacy to say that a subgroup isn't representative of the whole group. For example if you said "All Scottish people are drunks, I mean just look at all of them in this bar," it would not be a fallacy for someone to say "You are in a bar, the people here do not represent all the people in Scotland, this is a small subgroup."
Further, something like a developer isn't just an arbitrary label. You aren't a developer just because you say you are any more than you are astronaut or a plumber or the like. Someone that fucks around with a tiny bit of JS coding a bit in their free time isn't a developer, just like someone who once changed the drain trap on their sink is a plumber. When you talk about professions, there is the idea that you do it, well, professionally.
They spew whatever crap they believe supports their cause. They are not looking for information to form a conclusion, they have a conclusion and go trying to find things to support it. In the event things don't support it, they'll either ignore it, shout it down or, as in this case, try to rebrand it as supporting their cause.
He's no different from creationists: It's not about facts, not about science, it is about pushing an ideology. He is convinced he's right, so is unwilling to investigate his own beliefs further.
Talk to some gun owners sometime. You'll find many of them rather uneasy about the idea of selling to someone without a BG check. Thing is, there's nothing you can do other than to sell the gun to a dealer and have them resell it, which of course eats up money you might get. People do what they can to CYA, you can find forms online they'll print and have the other person fill out (none of which they are required to do). Some will just decide to do it through a shop anyways.
I'm one of those people. I'm not super in to firearms, but I like them, own 3 of them, and have a reasonably good working knowledge about them. Some time ago I decided to sell off one of my pistols. I had gotten a second one that I liked much better and didn't want the old one. It was a Glock 17, they sell pretty easy. However I was just uncomfortable selling it with no way of checking on the buyer, so I decided to eat the cost and sold it to a dealer. They offered me about half of what I'd get from an individual, no surprise since they were going to sell it for about what I would get (standard retail markup is about 100%).
I'd love the ability to have a good private BG check system, and you can be damn sure I'd use it.
How much would such a thing help? I'm not sure but I have trouble believing it would hurt.
If you take a chessboard and randomize the pieces, like a truly statistically random placement, it levels the playing field of humans a ton. Masters perform much closer to inexperienced players because one of the things humans rely on is seeing patterns they recognize and working from that, which doesn't happen. However chess programs do just fine. They can still simulate out all the moves to a good number of turns ahead and statistically decide the more optimal ones.
A big one would be medical diagnosis. The kind of analysis it does would be well suited to that. You feed it a patient profile, symptoms and so on. It then searches all the medical literature out there, every last bit, and returns what it believes are the most probably diagnoses, along with percentages (as it would do for Jeopardy answers on its visual output). It could also probably suggests tests to rule out things. If a doctor then subsequently ruled out a given condition, it can refactor the likely results.
That could really, really help medical diagnosis get more accurate, particularly for rare issues. As my doctor once told me "We can usually help you if it is common, or if it is serious, otherwise it can be difficult." There is just only so much one person can know. With an expert system like Watson, it can literally access all medical information ever. It is still going to need a doctor using it, it isn't the kind of thing that could be followed blindly, but it could really bring diagnosis to the next level and make it so that every primary care provider basically has access to the best, most comprehensive diagnosis information available.
Now that may not happen, because IBM seems to be a completely fucking stupid company that sells off or shuts down every useful project in favour of marketing overpriced services, but someone will do it at some point if not them.
Shit like this is marked on navigational charts, and there is a warning buoy. It isn't like this is some new feature either so if you happened not to have updated charts it wouldn't be there, the plant is decades old, your charts have it. Don't have charts? That's on you. Ocean navigation is serious business.
That aside, if you see something and you don't know what it is in the water, or see a buoy and don't know what it signifies, the right answer is to FIND OUT, not to go and look. Get on the radio and see what's up. In this case, even that wouldn't be necessary: This is right off the US coast, well within cellular range. He could have just pulled up maps on his smartphone.
Never mind all the other issues, of which there are many, but BTC has to compete with the credit card networks. They work effectively instantly. People are not interested in stepping backwards.
Well if Bitcoin is going to get expensive to use... then why would merchants (or customers) have any reason to like it over credit cards? Credit cards settle in seconds, and the network has scaled to massive size and can continue to scale no problem. The alleged advantages of Bitcoin that people liked to bandy about were that it was supposed to be really fast and not cost a bunch like credit cards do. If you can't deliver that (and it can't, it cannot scale to the levels it would need to) then there's little point.
Also "just pay more" is a self defeating thing if people keep following that. So faster transactions are needed, so people pay more for it, as more people pay to get fast, that becomes the new slow so you have to pay MORE and so on. It hasn't solved any kind of scaling issues. You can't argue that it'll reach and equilibrium because as I noted, there's already a system that does it very fast, and doesn't cost too much (2-3% is normally what payment processors charge).
It is an open API (though not free, you have to pay membership dues) that can be implemented on basically any platform people wish. As of right now, only nVidia and Intel have implemented it and only on Windows and Linux as far as I know, nVidia may have it in their drivers for other platforms. Apple has expressed no interest and most other OSes rely on the graphic drivers to provide APIs. AMD will eventually probably get a driver out, they were one of the driving forces behind Vulkan, however they suck at drivers so it always seems to take them a long time.
I started ad blocking because ads were just too intrusive. I'm not a zealot, I understand how things work and sites need to make money some how. However advertisers online are the laziest fuckers ever. In print or on TV ads are curated. There is a conversation between the media company and the ad company, money changes hands, and an ad is run in an agreed upon format for an agreed upon amount of times. On the Internet the advertisers just want you to directly embed their shit and to let them go hog fucking wild.
This then just lead to too many problem. Malware is one, though I have stuff on my computer that'll generally stop that. However just plain annoying shit is what really got me. Ads that auto-play sound, ads that block the whole site, ads that try to force you to go to another page, etc. Advertisers somehow fees that more annoying is the way to go.
Well I finally had enough, and adblocking goes on. I'll turn it off for select sites, though in general I don't have to since the good sites run their own ads, and those being on their own servers the adblocker doesn't notice.
I'll turn it off when the ad industry starts behaving, or when sites start making them. If that doesn't happen, well too fucking bad. I realize that will mean some sites will go under and I don't want that, but I will not put up with the completely shit experience that is the unfiltered web.
When I'm traveling, I always connect to public WiFi in the airport. It is usually pretty easy to tell which is the "official" airport one but whatever. I just fire up my VPN and go about my business. I know it isn't encrypted, isn't secured, etc. However getting things encrypted is cheap and easy as you say.
That the police can lie is quite well established, not just in the US legal system, but in most of them. When they are out trying to do their jobs they have no requirement to tell the truth to suspects. For that matter, neither do you. You can lie to people in your day to day business and it isn't illegal. The requirement to tell the truth only happens in court, when you are under oath, same as the police.
However the police aren't allowed to commit crimes, felonies in particular, in the course of their work. They can't break the law to uphold the law, otherwise the law loses its meaning. But that is precisely what happened here: They distributed illegal material, they broke the law.
Now you might think that's no different than a drug sting, however the big difference there is they don't actually distribute drugs. When the bug goes down, the person doing the buying gets arrested. The drugs, even if they were real (usually not) never go out of police custody. Same deal with hitman stings. They take a person's money in a presumed murder for hire, but they don't then actually go and kill the intended victim, rather they arrest the person who tried to hire them.
All the wall warts these days are switched mode PSUs. Well, you find those in computers too, and there efficiency has been of big interest. So SPMS units have gone from complete trash 20 years ago that were 60-70% efficient at best with a power factor in the realm of.5-.7 to stuff today as high as 96% efficient with.99 power factor.
So now it is about implementation. It does generally cost more to make them more efficient. No real R&D needed though, not to meet any of these requirements, we already know how to make efficient PSUs.
Slashdot needs ones. Seriously, for a community that claims to hate FUD, the OSS types sure like spreading it when it is about the "right" groups. If you actually care about what kinds of things the telemetry communicates back at various settings, the information is all out there for you. No, SSH data isn't one of them. However I am going to imagine you don't, and this is just crap you want to fling at "the bad guys" because you can.
Also a thought for you: Your OS, by definition, has access to anything any program on the system is doing. What would stop it from looking in at any 3rd party SSH server you ran, if you think it does that?
My guess would be that until we see something from this, it is just random speculation from a business site. Given that this article is literally from a month ago and is all hearsay, well let's just put a hold on making and kind of conclusions until there some actual information, shall we?
Slashdot Mirror
Who owns the equipment is just a matter of who replaces it if it breaks and maybe if you pay rental fees. From the operational point of view, it is all under the control of the cable company. When you hook up a modem you have to register it with your cable provider or it won't work. Due to the nature of DOCSIS, it isn't a "plug and go" situation they have to have it provisioned on their system. It has to be an approved model too, because they need to be able to send it a boot file which tells it various configuration options it needs. Also their equipment will ask the modem about its firmware, and update it if needed. Often when you first hook up a new modem your purchased it'll come up, get new firmware, and then reboot right away.
There's no difference to their equipment where a modem came from. All it cares about it what model it is. It then looks to see what bootfile and what firmware said modem ought to get.
The way it works is by getting your browser to go to the reboot page. However, if your browser can't, then it won't work. Since blocking the IP on your router will do that, you'll be safe. There is no public access to this interface, you have to get a computer on the local network to access it.
First off this thing is a modem, not a router. It just handles converting DOCSIS to ethernet, no built in routing capabilities or anything. They do make devices that are all-in-ones, but this one isn't.
Second, that "135 million" number is a marketing number. It is how many SurfBoard modems, and combo units total Arris claims they've sold, including when it was a Motorola brand. My SB6190, which has been on sale for all of like 5 months, has that same number stamped on it.
Third, many people are automatically protected by their routers since many routers ship with "disable private networks on WAN interface" turned on by default. That is, of course, a practical solution to the problem on any network. You can filter private networks (or just 192.168.100.1) on your WAN port, to which your modem is attached and then there's no issue.
Finally, while you could be mildly annoying with it, causing the modem to reboot, that's all you could do. It also wouldn't stick in a loop or anything like that as it requires you to click the link to make this happen.
So not a brilliant situation, but not really a big problem either. Also despite the scare words of "IPSs would have to roll out the fix" that is precisely what can, and likely will, happen. Your cable modem is under the control of your ISP and they can push new firmware to it when they need to. So fixes don't have to go out to lots of individuals, they just have to get them to the ISPs and then it can be automatically sent to all users. Updating modem firmware is something they do anyhow.
This is rather click-batey Slashdot piece :P
If you read the article that is precisely what happened. The Chinese bank froze the funds, and then reversed the transaction.
There are cases where someone can get screwed out of this happening, but when action is taken quickly it usually can be reversed since everything is tracked.
By that I mean that the GPU will be able to create a 4k framebuffer and render at 4k if it likes, and the outputs will be filly 4k capable.
However you are correct that it'll be seriously lacking in power. so as a practical matter, 99%+ of games will be rendered at a lower resolution and then upscaled. This is actually already the case to some extent. Many games cannot run at 1080 and hit their framerate target on the hardware today, so they are rendered at a lower resolution internally. For example Battlefield 4 has a 60 fps target since it is a shooter. To hit that it renders at 1600x900 on the PS4, and 1280x720 on the XBone. Watch Dogs is even more intense and so renders at those same resolutions, but only has a 30fps target.
So in some cases developers may elect to use more simple geometry/textures and thus will be able to make the new unit render at 4k natively, but most likely they'll elect not to. The trend seems to be to prefer higher detail games and sacrifice resolution and/or fps as necessary to hit that.
Seriously, there seems to be an obsession in parts of the Linux community to make yet another thing that already does what a bunch of existing software does. I'm not sure why but you see a lot of it. You'll get a distro that'll have 8 different media players, none of them worth a damn, rather than just having one good one but hey, you have options!
I'll give them the 100% retail markup, even though that's more than normal digital markup, but no more. I'm not going to have a situation like university bookstores where I sell the game and get 10% and the charge the person buying it 90% or some shit. You decide what you want to charge people for the used market, and give me half. I'll accept that. You get more greedy than that and I'm not interested.
A stock market shutdown happens for part of a day, triggered by well defined events.
Amount of time matters.
The first is that writing a graphics driver is REALLY HARD. I think a lot of the people who were complaining and asking didn't really understand the magnitude of what they were talking about. They were people who'd maybe messed around with a network driver or something and said "Huh, drivers aren't that bad." Graphics drivers are ENORMOUS things, exceedingly complex. Lots and lots and lots of code that interacts with a lot of stuff in different ways. I mean the GPU is literally a little computer in many respects. Also GPUs change fast. New generations come out every 2 years or so and are often radically different architectures with tons of new features. So you have continual new work to do. It isn't like a NIC or RAID controller where 95%+ of the features might be copy-paste from the previous gen. I don't think a lot of people understood just how big an undertaking a GPU driver is.
The second is that I think people forget there's a REASON the drivers are closed source and that is they make use of licensed code that cannot be open sourced. Well guess what? That code gets licensed for a reason. It makes developing this stuff easier, more feasible. You don't have that as an OSS developer, of course, so your life is going to be more difficult. I think there is a perception that the closed source drivers are closed "just because" or that the licensed code in them could be ripped out and replaced easily. No, not so much it seems. There's a reason for it.
The GP didn't say they weren't developers, just that they didn't do a good job representing developers as a whole. The claims is that more developers develop on something, the GP points out that it is really more of a particular subset. His opinion is also that the subset in question isn't likely very good.
It's not a "No true Scotsman," fallacy to say that a subgroup isn't representative of the whole group. For example if you said "All Scottish people are drunks, I mean just look at all of them in this bar," it would not be a fallacy for someone to say "You are in a bar, the people here do not represent all the people in Scotland, this is a small subgroup."
Further, something like a developer isn't just an arbitrary label. You aren't a developer just because you say you are any more than you are astronaut or a plumber or the like. Someone that fucks around with a tiny bit of JS coding a bit in their free time isn't a developer, just like someone who once changed the drain trap on their sink is a plumber. When you talk about professions, there is the idea that you do it, well, professionally.
They spew whatever crap they believe supports their cause. They are not looking for information to form a conclusion, they have a conclusion and go trying to find things to support it. In the event things don't support it, they'll either ignore it, shout it down or, as in this case, try to rebrand it as supporting their cause.
He's no different from creationists: It's not about facts, not about science, it is about pushing an ideology. He is convinced he's right, so is unwilling to investigate his own beliefs further.
Talk to some gun owners sometime. You'll find many of them rather uneasy about the idea of selling to someone without a BG check. Thing is, there's nothing you can do other than to sell the gun to a dealer and have them resell it, which of course eats up money you might get. People do what they can to CYA, you can find forms online they'll print and have the other person fill out (none of which they are required to do). Some will just decide to do it through a shop anyways.
I'm one of those people. I'm not super in to firearms, but I like them, own 3 of them, and have a reasonably good working knowledge about them. Some time ago I decided to sell off one of my pistols. I had gotten a second one that I liked much better and didn't want the old one. It was a Glock 17, they sell pretty easy. However I was just uncomfortable selling it with no way of checking on the buyer, so I decided to eat the cost and sold it to a dealer. They offered me about half of what I'd get from an individual, no surprise since they were going to sell it for about what I would get (standard retail markup is about 100%).
I'd love the ability to have a good private BG check system, and you can be damn sure I'd use it.
How much would such a thing help? I'm not sure but I have trouble believing it would hurt.
If you take a chessboard and randomize the pieces, like a truly statistically random placement, it levels the playing field of humans a ton. Masters perform much closer to inexperienced players because one of the things humans rely on is seeing patterns they recognize and working from that, which doesn't happen. However chess programs do just fine. They can still simulate out all the moves to a good number of turns ahead and statistically decide the more optimal ones.
A big one would be medical diagnosis. The kind of analysis it does would be well suited to that. You feed it a patient profile, symptoms and so on. It then searches all the medical literature out there, every last bit, and returns what it believes are the most probably diagnoses, along with percentages (as it would do for Jeopardy answers on its visual output). It could also probably suggests tests to rule out things. If a doctor then subsequently ruled out a given condition, it can refactor the likely results.
That could really, really help medical diagnosis get more accurate, particularly for rare issues. As my doctor once told me "We can usually help you if it is common, or if it is serious, otherwise it can be difficult." There is just only so much one person can know. With an expert system like Watson, it can literally access all medical information ever. It is still going to need a doctor using it, it isn't the kind of thing that could be followed blindly, but it could really bring diagnosis to the next level and make it so that every primary care provider basically has access to the best, most comprehensive diagnosis information available.
Now that may not happen, because IBM seems to be a completely fucking stupid company that sells off or shuts down every useful project in favour of marketing overpriced services, but someone will do it at some point if not them.
Shit like this is marked on navigational charts, and there is a warning buoy. It isn't like this is some new feature either so if you happened not to have updated charts it wouldn't be there, the plant is decades old, your charts have it. Don't have charts? That's on you. Ocean navigation is serious business.
That aside, if you see something and you don't know what it is in the water, or see a buoy and don't know what it signifies, the right answer is to FIND OUT, not to go and look. Get on the radio and see what's up. In this case, even that wouldn't be necessary: This is right off the US coast, well within cellular range. He could have just pulled up maps on his smartphone.
Hopefully his lawsuit gets dismissed out of hand.
Never mind all the other issues, of which there are many, but BTC has to compete with the credit card networks. They work effectively instantly. People are not interested in stepping backwards.
Well if Bitcoin is going to get expensive to use... then why would merchants (or customers) have any reason to like it over credit cards? Credit cards settle in seconds, and the network has scaled to massive size and can continue to scale no problem. The alleged advantages of Bitcoin that people liked to bandy about were that it was supposed to be really fast and not cost a bunch like credit cards do. If you can't deliver that (and it can't, it cannot scale to the levels it would need to) then there's little point.
Also "just pay more" is a self defeating thing if people keep following that. So faster transactions are needed, so people pay more for it, as more people pay to get fast, that becomes the new slow so you have to pay MORE and so on. It hasn't solved any kind of scaling issues. You can't argue that it'll reach and equilibrium because as I noted, there's already a system that does it very fast, and doesn't cost too much (2-3% is normally what payment processors charge).
It is an open API (though not free, you have to pay membership dues) that can be implemented on basically any platform people wish. As of right now, only nVidia and Intel have implemented it and only on Windows and Linux as far as I know, nVidia may have it in their drivers for other platforms. Apple has expressed no interest and most other OSes rely on the graphic drivers to provide APIs. AMD will eventually probably get a driver out, they were one of the driving forces behind Vulkan, however they suck at drivers so it always seems to take them a long time.
I started ad blocking because ads were just too intrusive. I'm not a zealot, I understand how things work and sites need to make money some how. However advertisers online are the laziest fuckers ever. In print or on TV ads are curated. There is a conversation between the media company and the ad company, money changes hands, and an ad is run in an agreed upon format for an agreed upon amount of times. On the Internet the advertisers just want you to directly embed their shit and to let them go hog fucking wild.
This then just lead to too many problem. Malware is one, though I have stuff on my computer that'll generally stop that. However just plain annoying shit is what really got me. Ads that auto-play sound, ads that block the whole site, ads that try to force you to go to another page, etc. Advertisers somehow fees that more annoying is the way to go.
Well I finally had enough, and adblocking goes on. I'll turn it off for select sites, though in general I don't have to since the good sites run their own ads, and those being on their own servers the adblocker doesn't notice.
I'll turn it off when the ad industry starts behaving, or when sites start making them. If that doesn't happen, well too fucking bad. I realize that will mean some sites will go under and I don't want that, but I will not put up with the completely shit experience that is the unfiltered web.
When I'm traveling, I always connect to public WiFi in the airport. It is usually pretty easy to tell which is the "official" airport one but whatever. I just fire up my VPN and go about my business. I know it isn't encrypted, isn't secured, etc. However getting things encrypted is cheap and easy as you say.
That the police can lie is quite well established, not just in the US legal system, but in most of them. When they are out trying to do their jobs they have no requirement to tell the truth to suspects. For that matter, neither do you. You can lie to people in your day to day business and it isn't illegal. The requirement to tell the truth only happens in court, when you are under oath, same as the police.
However the police aren't allowed to commit crimes, felonies in particular, in the course of their work. They can't break the law to uphold the law, otherwise the law loses its meaning. But that is precisely what happened here: They distributed illegal material, they broke the law.
Now you might think that's no different than a drug sting, however the big difference there is they don't actually distribute drugs. When the bug goes down, the person doing the buying gets arrested. The drugs, even if they were real (usually not) never go out of police custody. Same deal with hitman stings. They take a person's money in a presumed murder for hire, but they don't then actually go and kill the intended victim, rather they arrest the person who tried to hire them.
Hence why people are worked up here.
All the wall warts these days are switched mode PSUs. Well, you find those in computers too, and there efficiency has been of big interest. So SPMS units have gone from complete trash 20 years ago that were 60-70% efficient at best with a power factor in the realm of .5-.7 to stuff today as high as 96% efficient with .99 power factor.
So now it is about implementation. It does generally cost more to make them more efficient. No real R&D needed though, not to meet any of these requirements, we already know how to make efficient PSUs.
Slashdot needs ones. Seriously, for a community that claims to hate FUD, the OSS types sure like spreading it when it is about the "right" groups. If you actually care about what kinds of things the telemetry communicates back at various settings, the information is all out there for you. No, SSH data isn't one of them. However I am going to imagine you don't, and this is just crap you want to fling at "the bad guys" because you can.
Also a thought for you: Your OS, by definition, has access to anything any program on the system is doing. What would stop it from looking in at any 3rd party SSH server you ran, if you think it does that?
Their EuqalLogic and Compellent lines are developed and supported out of Nashua. Might move around now that they own EMC but for now, it is there.
My guess would be that until we see something from this, it is just random speculation from a business site. Given that this article is literally from a month ago and is all hearsay, well let's just put a hold on making and kind of conclusions until there some actual information, shall we?